Refusing to Stick to the Subject

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Jordan Peterson gets quite upset when he is accused of being sexist and misogynist. Unfortunately, his latest response in the ongoing series of debates over whether he is the reincarnation of Nietzsche or merely the latest in a long line of privileged provocateurs claiming the mantle of ‘radical’ while committing themselves to defending conservative social orders suggests that he is definitely a sexist.¹

There is nothing the least bit controversial about any of this, unless you are a doctrinaire radical of the sort likely to characterize your ideological indoctrination and lack of familiarity with the relevant psychological and anthropological literature as “feminist philosophy.”

Here is a textbook definition of sexism in action, revealed quite simply, by the use of scare quotes above.

We use scare quotes around terms to indicate suspicion, skepticism, mockery, dismissal, and the like; to use a pair of these is to indicate that the term in question lacks validity or legitimacy of a certain kind–for instance, were I to want to puncture Peterson’s pretensions to be a serious thinker or an intellectual, I would write the following sentence: “The Canadian academic Jordan Peterson imagines he is a ‘serious thinker’; unfortunately, ‘intellectuals’ like him are frequently confused in such self-assessments.”

What has Peterson placed scare quotes around? Around a title that is quite clearly Manne’s to own: feminist philosopher, and around a field of study she has engaged with: feminist philosophy. Manne is a PhD from MIT, and is a tenured (or tenure-track) assistant professor of philosophy at a reputable institution; she has the professional qualifications in academia–of which Peterson is a member, and whose standards he is well aware of, and indeed acknowledges them above–to be called a philosopher. Moreover, she works in a well-established area of political and ethical philosophy; feminist philosophy is an academic field with practitioners, journals, conferences, and ongoing internal debates and external engagements. There is, in short, precisely no good reason to place scare quotes around either of the two terms above.

Now, the charge of sexism: Peterson does not even place scare quotes around the academic fields and academics he despises: Marxism, postmodernists, doctrinaire radicals. He does not place scare quotes around Sean Illing’s title above. He does not place scare quotes around titles and fields when referring to male academics or the fields they work in. His special animus is reserved for a woman philosopher, working in feminist philosophy (a field of study mostly by, about, and for, women.)

This is textbook sexism. Jordan Peterson is a sexist tool.

Note #1: The charge of misogyny will be far more ably laid by Kate Manne herself; but Peterson’s sneering mannerisms, his self-pity, his anger, all indicate to me this man is a misogynist, and a dangerous one at that.

In brief, the main shape of…all subsequent bourgeois revolutionary politics were by now clearly visible. This dramatic dialectical dance was to dominate the future generations. Time and again we shall see moderate middle class reformers mobilizing the masses against die-hard resistance or counter-revolution. We shall see the masses pushing beyond the moderates’ aims to their own social revolutions, and the moderates in turn splitting into a conservative group henceforth making common cause with the reactionaries, and a left wing group determined to pursue the rest of the as yet unachieved moderate aims with the help of the masses, even at the risk of losing control over them. And so on through repetitions and variations of the pattern of resistance—mass mobilization—shift to the left—split among- moderates-and-shift-to-the-right—until either the bulk of the middle class passed into the henceforth conservative camp, or was defeated by social revolution. In most subsequent bourgeois revolutions the moderate liberals were to pull back, or transfer into the conservative camp, at a very early stage. Indeed…we increasingly find…that they became unwilling to begin revolution at all, for fear of its incalculable consequences, preferring a compromise with king and aristocracy.

Hobswawm was writing these words in 1962–about the post-Bastille, pre-Jacobin, pre-Terror, French Revolution–so he knew well of what he spoke. He could well have been speaking of contemporary times and politics, of the American election season of 2016, and its ‘revolution that did not come to be’ – the Bernie Sanders Insurgency.

On November 9th, American liberals and progressives of a particular bent will wake up to find out they’ve been snookered yet again by the Democratic Party, by the same old trick that has been reliably used to make sure the minds and attention of their reliable voting demographics will not go wandering, looking for alternatives. Their support for the ‘Bernie Revolution’ earned them little other than the abuse of their own supposed ‘comrades,’ the ‘liberal’ coalition that backs Hillary Clinton’s candidacy: they were reviled as sexist, tainted by white privilege, as unrealistic nihilists. They were urged to make cause with their political foes, urged to pull back from the brink to which they were marching the nation; they were urged to settle for a chance to ‘pull Clinton to the left,’ to get ‘their demands written into the party platform.’ Meanwhile, that mythical creature, ‘the moderate Republican’ was also persuaded to join the Clinton Coalition. That fundamentally conservative bent in American politics–which reveres that undemocratic document, the US Constitution, which claims American exceptionalism is a wholly understandable and justified attitude–asserted itself all over again, all the better with which to discredit the nascent stirrings of a mass movement (which in its populist strains found some curious resonances in the groups who supported Donald Trump’s candidacy.)

When the smoke clears, for all the sound and fury of this interminable season, little will have changed: the Republican Party will have disowned Donald Trump and gone back to its reactionary ways; the Democratic Party, having long ago moved into territory occupied by the Right, will pat itself on its back for having performed a remarkable act of sheepdogging. A familiar pattern indeed.

Paralysis isn’t the same thing as anaesthesis…It’s insofar as there’s been an awakening to a whole series of problems that the difficulty of doing anything comes to be felt….’what is to be done’ ought not to be determined from above by reformers, be they prophetic or legislative, but by a long work of comings and goings, of exchanges, reflections, trials, different analyses. If the social workers you are talking about don’t know which way to turn, this just goes to show they are looking, and hence not anaesthetized or sterilized at all….And it’s because of the need not to tie them down or immobilize them that there can be no question for me trying to tell them, “what is to be done.” If the questions posed by the social workers you spoke of are going to assume their full amplitude, the most important thing is not to bury them under the weight of prescriptive, prophetic discourse. The necessity of reform musn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell you, “Don’t criticize, since you are not capable of carrying out reform.” That’s ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to the premises of a deduction that concludes: This then is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in the processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.

In the long and dishonorable list of Cliched Reactions to Political Protest and Critique, the kneejerk “but where is your positive theory?” must rank as among the worst. This form of ‘keep talking while I stick my fingers in my ears’ political theater serves several vital functions: most importantly, it instantiates and facilitates political paralysis even as it renders that accusation at the critic. As a piece of political ju-jitsu, despite being so bald-faced about its deceptions and disingenuousness, it has proved remarkably effective over the years: very little radical political critique can escape the charge of being ‘destructive’ in its formulations. But as Foucault points out, the ‘awakening’ it brings in its wake has to have its future direction determined, not on the basis of self-serving assessments of the critique, but by the opportunities it presents for further ‘conflict and confrontation,’ a process that has to be pitched at that level for long enough before anything will give. To cease and desist the critique in the face of the imperative to offer ‘positive theory,’ to smoothen its harsh edges, is to play the game of reaction, to succumb to ‘blackmail serving to limit…the exercise of criticism.’

Conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of changes. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must always be painting it again….Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. [pp. 15]

Perhaps the most memorable line in the book is spoken by Don Fabrizio’s nephew, Tancredi, urging unsuccessfully that Don Fabrizio abandon his allegiance to the disintegrating Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and ally himself with Giuseppe Garibaldi and the House of Savoy: “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

The modern Republican Party supposedly suffers from ideological confusion. It is for the regulation of gay marriage and reproductive rights; it is against the regulation of industrial pollution, healthcare insurance, and workplace safety. It is for the reduced power of the executive branch, except when it comes to spying on Americans and declaring war. It is for the religious freedom of Christian evangelicals but not Muslim Americans. These seemingly disparate platforms actually display a coherent unity: the American Right is committed to preserving all hierarchy and imposed order: men over women, white over black, rich over poor, bosses over workers, Christian majorities over Muslim minorities. This love of hierarchy, of entrenched power, is manifest in the most visible face of opposition to the Obama Presidency: the Tea Party and the new crop of Republican representatives it has sent to Congress.

The Trump candidacy is a classic conservative candidacy: it seeks massive, sweeping changes precisely so that crucial hierarchies–like the ones made note of above–will be preserved. Populism to prop up hierarchy: that’s conservatism at its finest. (These thoughts have been expressed far more eloquently by Corey Robin in his The Reactionary Mind.)

The rhetoric of “law and order” was first mobilized in the late 1950s Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern states to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely “rewarding lawbreakers.”

For more than a decade–from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s–conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime. Civil rights protests were frequently depicted as criminal rather than political in nature, and federal courts were accused of excessive lenience. thereby contributing to the spread of crime. In the words of then vice-president Richard Nixon, the increasing crime rate “can be traced directly to the spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to disobey them.” Some segregationists went further, insisting that segregation causes crime, citing lower crime rates in Southern states as evidence that segregation was necessary.

Sounds familiar, right?

When you want to make a ‘same as it ever was’ point, you are offered a choice: point to the present and then to the past, or point to the past and then to the present. As an added rhetorical flourish, you could mutter dark imprecations about history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce.

In a post here a few days ago, I had made note of how the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration had reported that the Black Lives Matter movement and its concomitant Ferguson Effect had resulted in an increase in lawlessness and crime rates. (The New York Times had dutifully convened one of its Room for Debate segments to conduct a serious investigation of this ‘report.’)

These ideological tactics–responding to political protests with accusations of criminality–are exceedingly transparent; their pedigree and historical provenance is well-established. Their deployment by reactionary law-enforcement agencies should not be surprising; they possess an established record of success in these political climes. What should be is the credulity of those who should know better–like for instance, esteemed members of our national media, who, apparently devoid of any historical consciousness whatsoever, faithfully parrot these claims without making note of their deployment in the past.

These calls are not new; it has always been thus. As the Algerian feminist Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas noted in the context of feminist struggles in ‘Third-World’ and post-colonial contexts:

It is never, has never been the right moment to protest … in the name of women’s interests and rights: not during the liberation struggle against colonialism, because all forces should be mobilized against the principal enemy: French colonialism; not after Independence, because all forces should be mobilized to build up the devastated country; not now that racist imperialistic Western governments are attacking Islam and the Third World, etc.) Defending women’s rights “now” (this “now” being ANY historical moment) is always a betrayal-of the people, of the nation, of the revolution, of Islam, of national identity, of cultural roots, of the Third World. [quoted by Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak in “French Feminism Revisited”, Feminists Theorize the Political, Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 71.]

The mechanisms of reaction to resistance are rich and varied; they take many forms; they take on many virtuous guises. They bid activists look hither and thither for guidance from ideals and objectives that are mere distractions. They claim occult compulsions should stay activists’ hand and feet and quieten and attenuate their voices; they suggest activist commitments are betrayals of other causes, ones whose claims should be recognized as more pressing, more demanding of their passions and energies.

But reaction is reaction. Its aims are always the same . It seeks only one outcome and it directs itself towards it with unflagging energy and passion and creativity: the preservation of existing orders of power. When the smoke clears, and when all the homages have been paid to the various idols it bids the activist worship and be in thrall to, the reactionary wishes to see the world as it was: configured and arranged to sustain its position at the top of the Great Political Chain of Being.

As sophisticated as the recent literature about conservatism is, however it suffers from three weaknesses. The first is a lack of comparative perspective. Scholars of the American right rarely examine the movement in relation to its European counterpart. Indeed, among many writers it seems to be an article of faith that, like all things American, conservatism is exceptional.

Robin then goes on to point out continuities between American and European conservatism before going to to provide a rich intellectual history of conservatism, one that aims to show it to be a dynamic force of reaction and counter-revolution through the ages, one implacably opposed, not to change per se, but to a change in the hierarchies of political ordering and power.

My intention here is not to dispute or examine this analysis; for that we have a faculty study group at Brooklyn College. Rather I was struck, as I read Robin’s listing of weaknesses in recent scholarship on conservatism, by the presence of a similar lack of comparative perspective in Robin’s work, by its only-partial expansion of the analytical lens to focus on American and European conservatism alone. From the taxonomy constructed above, it would appear that conservatism as a political entity, an intellectual movement or body of work, or as force of reaction and counter-revolution is confined to Europe and the United States. To be sure, its impress might be felt elsewhere–after all, the counter-revolutionary governments of the United States and Europe have acted to resist revolution in Asia, Africa and Latin America–but as a political and intellectual force it originates in those spheres alone. (The index of authors in Robin’s work does not list African, Latin American or Asian conservative political theorists, or polemicists.)

Now, conservatism as reaction does not appear to be confined to these spheres; the long, bitter, disputed histories of these continents is ample evidence for that claim; reaction here, must have found its grounding too, in patterns of thought and theory articulated by, among others, intellectuals, writers, journalists, and party hacks. (Here I am not identifying “conservatism” with a named political movement or party, but rather, in accordance with Robin’s thesis, as the forces of reaction that have resisted movements of resistance aimed at upending established hierarchies of order, using a variety of polemical, political and rhetorical strategies, including, most recently a genuine populism that seeks to include previously oppressed classes in the spoils of power.) Perhaps examining conservative thought more broadly–geographically speaking, at least–might have enabled an engagement with questions like: Are Mario Vargas Llosa and Olavo de Carvalho conservatives in Robin’s sense? Are the South African theoreticians of apartheid to be understood as conservative? Where do the theoreticians of the Indian caste system fit into a taxonomy of conservative thought? And so on.

In pointing this out, I am doing no more than indicating the blindingly obvious, and a scholar as accomplished as Robin would be the first to note this himself. (It might be that I missed in my reading, a stipulation that “conservatism” was to be understood as identifying a particularly Anglo-American-European ideology.)

Then why the lack of the “comparative perspective” in Robin’s work? Besides the straightforward one that one writes about what one knows best, I think the blind spot also exists for the same reason that in my recent book on legal theory I concentrated on American common law first, with European civil law a distant second, and do not investigate in any adequate sense, Latin American, African or Asian scholarship in the relevant domains: to write from the vantage point of the American academy is to all too easily take it to be the center of the academic and intellectual universe. This is not because one assumes a mantle of superiority but rather that that is the seat that we are pointed to, the position we assume, and it seems, are almost required to take ex-officio. In this tacit assumption of centrality, even the most allegedly cosmopolitan amongst us are reminded of the enduring and persistent allure of provincialism.